The present invention relates to a system and method for the presentation of advertisements. More particularly, the present invention pertains to a system and method of presenting bonus exposure of an advertisement based on interest of one or more Viewers in the advertisement.
Advertising is a common way for a seller of goods and services to generate sales. In traditional media, such as television and print media, an advertisement is seen by a variety of people. Only a portion of those people, if any, will be inclined to seek out more information from the seller and fewer still will eventually purchase the goods and/or services offered for sale. In the traditional media, there is typically a limited supply of space for advertisements. For example, a half-hour television show will provide perhaps no more than eight minutes for advertisements. In the art, the amount of resources (e.g., physical space, time, etc.) available for advertising is sometimes referred to as inventory. In recent years, the Internet has provided a new and powerful medium for advertising.
The Internet is now regarded as a powerful tool for advertising and marketing services and products. The amount of money spent on Internet-based advertising has increased dramatically over its relatively short history and is expected to rise consistently in the foreseeable future. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), over $2 billion dollars was spent on Internet-based advertising in the first quarter of the calendar year 2000 (a three-fold increase over the same period of 1999). Jupiter Communications, a New York consulting firm, has predicted that Internet or “on-line” advertising will reach $28 billion by 2005. The IAB has predicted that Internet-based advertising will grow almost 40% annually between 2000–2004. The increase in availability of Internet advertising and the number of persons who use the Internet will affect the advertising industry as a whole. As systems of accountability are developed and the amount of advertising inventory increases, vendors or publishers in all media will be faced with the problems of attracting advertisers while, at the same time, covering overhead costs.
One problem associated with current methods of selling Internet advertising is the difficulty of striking a fair and reasonable balance between fixed-fee based pricing and performance-based pricing. While providers of advertising resources (“Sellers”) generally seek to decrease their financial risk by charging a fixed fee for advertising space, purchasers of advertising resources (“Buyers”) seek to decrease their financial risk by basing payment on performance (i.e. the number of viewers of the advertising content (“Viewers”) that perform a defined action, such as visit a store or web-site or make a purchase). Sellers have attempted to cover costs and attract Buyers by offering hybrids of the fixed-fee and performance-based pricing models, but pressures brought on by increased accountability and a surplus of inventory, have made it increasingly difficult for Sellers to secure fair and balanced pricing.
Sellers have been pressured into offering more performance-based pricing models because of the increase in the accountability of delivery systems, particularly with regard to Internet advertising. Traditionally, advertising fees are based on the number of Viewers exposed to the advertising content. That model, however, is being changed.
Recent methods of advertising have made it possible to determine not only the volume and demographic information on Viewers who see a particular advertising message, but the number of Viewers who actually respond to a particular advertising message by buying a product or registering with a merchant as a potential purchaser. An example of such a method is a billboard that lists a special phone number along with the advertising message. If a Viewer calls that phone number, then the merchant knows that the Viewer became interested in the product or service because of the billboard message. Another example is Internet-based advertising, where a set of instructions is attached to an advertising banner that redirects the Viewer to the merchant's web-page when that Viewer “clicks” on the banner. In this way, the merchant knows that the Viewer became interested in the product or service because of that message. Buyers use these methods of accountability to leverage Sellers into basing their fees on such performance.
Sellers have also been pressured into a more performance based pricing model by a surplus in inventory, particularly with regard to Internet advertising. For example, the inherent nature of the Internet creates a rapidly increasing amount of advertising inventory. Each Viewer downloads or, in effect, “creates” each presentation of the advertising message image (called an “impression”) on the viewing screen. The number of impressions that may be viewed on a single screen is limited only by the amount of time the Viewer spends at the computer and the amount of time it takes to download an advertising image from the network. The number of Viewers is growing steadily as is the number of web-sites. Given these facts, and the fact that the potential inventory of advertising space on a particular web-site is limited only by the size of the site, which is also expandable, the potential supply of advertising inventory across the Internet is almost limitless. True commodity pricing assumes that a finite amount of the commodity will be available, whereas an ever-increasing supply of the commodity means that the price of that commodity will continue to decrease. Sellers are leveraged into offering a more performance-based pricing model because they cannot maintain fixed-fee-based commodity pricing.
The pressure on Sellers of Internet advertising to provide performance based pricing models is particularly intense because the Internet provides a high degree of accountability and potential inventory is almost limitless. When comparing the Internet advertising marketplace to the television or radio advertising marketplace, it is noted that the supply of television or radio commercials is dictated by the number of channels and the hours in a day. In the Internet marketplace, however, the low price of entry for new publishers and the proliferation of desktop applications and web-sites mean that the amount of advertising space will expand at a much greater rate than traditional broadcast advertising space and, thus, there are really no fixed resources to enter into the pricing structure for this type of advertising.
Currently, Sellers of Internet advertising are forced to compete with one another by offering performance based pricing and by increasing the attractiveness of their web-sites. If sites are more attractive (useful or entertaining) to the right kind of Viewer, then they will attract advertisers (Buyers of advertising) who want to reach those specific Viewers. Higher attractiveness means greater overhead costs for creating, managing, and delivering attractive content. If a Seller's revenues are based entirely on performance-based pricing models, it will run the risk of not being able to cover costs. For example, a Seller having a great reputation for attracting Viewers because of the quality of its content may run a particular Buyer's advertising campaign that, for whatever unanticipated reason, fails to attract any response from Viewers. If that Seller had based its revenue primarily on a performance-based pricing model, its revenue may be so low as to not cover overhead costs.
In view of the above, there is a need for an improved system and method for the presentation and sale of advertising in a variety of advertising media, especially in the Internet environment.